Class Fives: Origins

by Jon H. Thompson

  “Great news,” he typed back swiftly, his fingers trembling.

  “5.0 no later than the 16th. Come look. We’ll celebrate.”

  Montgomery allowed a small smile. Ah, my friend, if I could, I most certainly would join you. I would love to see it for myself. But my place is here, and that small pleasure is one I will have to forego. Of course, he would be sending others in his stead. A team of specialists in their own way. And Svag would never have to suffer the indignity of living on beyond the completion of his greatest work, like so many others before him. He would, he had decided, give him that much. A very brief immortality.

  He directed his attention back to the keyboard. It was time to give the man his due once more. To thank him, and make sure he knew of his glorious achievement. The condemned deserve no less.

  Constantine Gvorshin, former member of the Russian Special Services unit, slogged back toward the dome, feeling the oily wet crunch of the sodden ground under every step. An ungodly place, he thought again. Miserable and difficult. But the money was more than he had expected to earn in whatever few years he had remaining to him when his unique skills would be at their peak.

  He stopped, shifting his weight slightly to make sure he didn’t settle too deeply into the ooze that already tightly embraced his boots, and looked over at the dome.

  It was impressive, the size of an aircraft hanger, and completely empty inside except for the strange metal contraption that was just now being secured into place high up inside the structure, on the crisscrossing exoskeleton that looped over the dome, forming a massive “x”. They were currently connecting the thick cables to the device, and once that was completed, and the other ends of the lines linked to the now fully operational reactor buried a hundred yards away, they could do the power test.

  After that, it was merely a matter of applying the camouflage to make it appear nothing more than a huge lump in the earth, and awaiting the delivery of the final component. A small container of something that would be the target of the now-suspended device inside the dome.

  His lip curled up sourly, and he gave his head a faint shake.

  Science, he thought. All that money, all that work, all that time, and for what? So some ridiculous genius somewhere could prove something about something that would make a lot of other geniuses say “ah” respectfully, at some cocktail party somewhere? So that some other geniuses could present him with a little award, honoring him as the smartest little boy in the class?

  Scientists don’t get laid enough, he thought.

  But, if this was how they wanted to spend their lives, their money and their intelligence, who was he to argue? Besides, this job would be completed within a week, he had been assured, and then he would see about getting himself some of what those silly geniuses so badly needed. Maybe a double portion this time, he considered.

  God bless scientists and their nice, fat wallets, he thought.

  Crawford sat in the glassed-in office at the top tier of the control center, scanning the data as it poured over the screen jutting up from his desktop. The facility was located well outside Washington, buried in the hills of rural Virginia, its existence masked by the placid countryside atop it, but its tentacles reaching out, connecting it to data sources all over the nation. It was the heart of the current U.S. effort to centralize the collection of electronic and other data in a single location, to have it readily available the moment it was retrieved. This would be his home now, until the current crisis was fully resolved. The two men in the dark suits stood on the other side of the desk, referring to the data pads.

  “So,” Crawford said at last, “We have Mr. Franklin receiving funding from the Karillan Foundation to construct something, which he ships off and then is killed. We have the Karillan Foundation itself, all funding coming from very-well-camouflaged offshore accounts, administered by a secret board that turns out to be a shadow. So we have hundreds of millions of dollars that we can’t account for. Is that about right?”

  He glanced up to survey the two men.

  “We’ve just developed an additional hit, sir,” one of them said, tapping his data pad and nodding toward Crawford’s computer.

  Crawford’s eyes dropped back to the screen and he began scanning the new data.

  “Who,” he said, “Is Dr. Stephan Svag?”

  “Particle physicist,” the other man said, “Works out of the Czech Republic, just outside of Prague.”

  “And,” Crawford interrupted, scanning the screen, “He’s been receiving funding from the same accounts as Franklin.”

  “Yes, sir,” the man replied.

  “Okay,” Crawford said, turning to regard them, “We need to get people on him, right now. If he’s working on something for Montgomery, we have to get to it first.”

  “We’ll need special diplomatic clearance,” the first man said.

  Crawford reached for the phone.

  “Start pulling a team together. Make it for possible incursion, but keep it light. No heavy weapons. We don’t want to start World War Three. I’ll start working on the clearance.”

  The men nodded, turned and exited the office, stepping back down to the bustling stations on the floor below.

  “Get me Dennis Anderson at State, please. Put it through to here,” he said when the line clicked open, then hung up and turned back to the computer screen.

  Whatever was developing was happening very fast. He’d managed to construct a rough timeline from the bits and pieces of scattered data that was assembling itself, and it left him feeling chilled.

  Franklin had built something and shipped it to a small airport in Biliyarsk, Russia, where it had been unloaded, and promptly vanished. Crawford had satellites re-tasked to examine the entire region, but it was vast, and if the site was decently camouflaged, there was little chance they would spot it. According to Dr. Henry, it wouldn’t even emit any readable energy signature. It would simply be a peaceful, open stretch of wilderness until the moment it blew, with God- alone-knew what consequences.

  And now this Dr. Svag had suddenly turned up, also apparently doing work for Montgomery through the shadowy foundation. Was his the last piece? Or only one in a long chain? He couldn’t take the risk that he had much time. Regardless of how close things were to whatever moment was approaching, he had to act as if it was his last opportunity to stop it. That had been the massive mistake his predecessors had made, way back when. Always wanting to have every duck in a neat little row, every bit of data snugly plugged into their scenarios. But the age when time could be taken to make sure everything was correct, every contingency was covered, was long past. Now that it was possible for something to pop up on the grid with only days, perhaps hours, before it turned Hellish, speed was the primary consideration. One could apologize for blundering ahead with only a portion of a plan. One could not apologize over a scene of utter devastation with the excuse that there hadn’t been absolute certainty. This, he knew, was a war, one that might never end, against enemies unknown, or perhaps not yet even born. The world was a new kind of combat zone, and battle stations had to be manned, constantly, perhaps forever. It was indeed a sad new world.

  He would have to get resources into Russia, he considered, turning his attention back to the main problem, on the ground, ready to act at a moment’s notice, and that was a boiling nightmare waiting to blow. Regardless of how covert he attempted to make it, the logistical trail would be impossible to disguise. It required transport, communications, weapons and God-knew-what-else. And with the current state of international relations, with many foreign eyes constantly scanning, looking for the unusual, the out of place, a single helicopter sitting on the wrong pad at some friendly base a bit too close to a border, or a casual communication from the wrong person, could start bells ringing long before any operation even got off the ground. And this would be a covert incursion into territory whose power had to be respected.

  And then there was Montgomery himself. He had to be located. And soon. Even if he had no
direct control over the coming events, he would at least know the details, enough perhaps to stop it, uncover it, reveal it.

  And supposedly Montgomery was somewhere in Montana. But where?

  Crawford already had teams poring over every scrap of data leaking out of and through that entire state, concentrating within a hundred miles of the airport where Dr. Jenkins had disappeared. But so far nothing. If Montgomery was there, he was buried very deep and staying quiet. But he must be using a proxy, Crawford thought. Someone to stand in for him when absolutely necessary. This was the preferred method of complex communication between those with the power to make decisions and those with the skills to carry them out. Everyone now knew that the ease and convenience of electronic communication in any form was quickly becoming worthless for the commission of various undesirable acts. A careless phone call, an innocuous email, or even a stroll down a street under the eye of a security camera, were now all things to be approached cautiously for such people, if at all. That data could, and most likely would, be plucked out of the constantly moving web of electronic impulses carpeting the world, and set off fireworks somewhere.

  The kind of people it was Crawford’s job to identify, locate and, if necessary, target had finally learned this. Now they used couriers, bland, forgettable people who could move unnoticed, carrying messages, information and orders between the hidden points of a secret network. And even that wasn’t foolproof. If they could be identified, they could be tracked. Osama Bin Laden discovered the consequences of that firsthand with a bullet through his head.

  So, Crawford reasoned, if there was a courier shuttling between Montgomery and his distant contacts, then he would have to travel out of a convenient airport, such as the one Jenkins disappeared in. Perhaps even the same one.

  He jotted down a note to have the analysts dig up the records of every ticket sold at that airport for the last year, and get him full details on every individual who made multiple trips to unusual destinations. It was a long shot, but such things had paid off before, he knew.

  He was grasping at straws, he told himself. But what else did he have at the moment?

  A welling of frustration bubbled up within him and he took a moment to calm himself. That wouldn’t help, he thought. The only thing to do now was to work the data and be prepared to instantly move with any resources he needed.

  But what resources? There was no way to take an entire strike team and make them invisible to the many air defense radars that lined and covered the vast Asian territory, ever watchful of intrusion, ever prepared to protect their sovereignty, by force if necessary.

  Of course stealth technology was designed for just that purpose, to throw back a radar signature so tiny that a massive intercontinental bomber, like the B-2, would appear no more than a sparrow on any radar return. But those state-of-the-art craft were designed to drop bombs, not paratroopers. And this was a case that required boots on the ground to assure that nothing was missed, that everything was totally destroyed. And the B-2 didn’t have the capacity to transport troops. It would be difficult enough for a single man to try to exit one of them in flight. The buffeting of the wind at that high speed and altitude would make a High Altitude Low Opening jump look like hopping into a kiddie pool from a waterslide.

  For a moment his mind seemed to pause, recognizing in the thought something that nagged quietly at him. For an instant he started to dismiss it as somewhere between ridiculous and unthinkable, but stopped before slapping it away entirely.

  Why not, he mused? In practical terms, was there any reason it couldn’t be done?

  He did a quick calculation, comparing it to all the various procedures, requirements and certainties any resource had to conform with before it could even be considered for active use in the field, and was surprised to realize that, in this one case, none of them seemed to apply.

  Would there even be any liability concerns? He couldn’t think of a single one. Granted, it would be a raw resource, completely unprepared, totally devoid of the careful molding and refining that normally were a basic requirement before it could even be provisionally available for use in the field.

  But there was no time for that now, and every way he thought about it, it seemed absolutely perfect for this situation. At most it would require only a means of extraction, and perhaps not even that. It could be thrown in and could not be lost, damaged or impacted in any way. And it would reduce the risk almost to nothing. It seemed to overcome all the major problems in one stroke. And if the reports he had been receiving over the last few days were at all accurate… But it all depended on –

  Never mind, he told himself sharply, already turning his mind to rough out the framework of an operation, just in case it was possible. The moment he put down the pen from jotting the dozen lines of notes, he reached for the phone.

  Only one way to find out, he thought.

  The bald man leaned against the hood of the car, staring off toward the highway. He always deliberately arrived at such meetings early. It gave him a chance to enjoy the open air.

  Whenever he wasn’t acting as the stand-in for his employer, traveling the world, providing not only instruction for the disconnected individuals who played their ignorant parts in the grand design, but severing the connection between them and the project once they had performed their function, he enjoyed simply being quiet and absorbing what he could of each moment. They were, after all, meaningless. All of it was meaningless, fit only to keep the mind amused for a moment, before it faded into nothingness. He got that now.

  He hadn’t at first, when he’d originally been approached by the elderly man with the fascinating story and the very deep pockets. But during the long hours in the bunker, only each other for company, he had learned from the man. Learned so much. Learned such horrible things.

  And now he understood. It had been hard to absorb and even harder to reconcile, but he had managed it. And now he was at peace. Now he could relax. Because it was all meaningless. And if it indeed had no meaning, then its only purpose was to be enjoyed, savored, reveled in. And leaning against his car on a sunny day in the parking lot of a strip mall just off a desert highway was as good a place as any for that.

  He let his eyes sweep over the distant horizon, seeing the change in color from earth to sky over the pencil-thin line that marked the edge of the world. Quite beautiful, he thought. Very soothing.

  The other vehicle eased down the row of parked cars and slowed to a stop just behind his own.

  He pushed himself from the hood and moved around to the passenger’s side door of his car, pulling it open and extracting the large, bulging envelope.

  He stepped around the other vehicle and approached the driver’s door. The smoky window slid down to reveal the muscular blond man inside, his eyes hidden behind the dark glasses already turned to him.

  The bald man extended the envelope, and the blond reached lazily through the open window to take it.

  “This everything?” he said quietly.

  The bald man nodded.

  “And the money?”

  “It will be wired to your account as already discussed. You should have the first payment already.”

  The blond man looked down at the envelope, then reached to open it.

  “I would prefer you didn’t do that now,” the bald man said, a bit sharply.

  But the blond ignored him, shooting a finger under the flap and letting it tear along the edge of the closure. Inside bulged with folded papers, some passports and some other bits and pieces. The blond glanced into it, turned slowly back to the bald man and gave a slow, tight smile.

  “Sorry,” he said, “just had to be sure.”

  He turned to gently set the envelope on the passenger’s seat, then turned back.

  “So, I take it we won’t be seeing each other again.”

  “That’s right,” the bald man responded.

  The blond nodded slowly.

  “In that case, it’s been nice doing business with you.”


  “And you, Lieutenant,” the bald man replied.

  “Say Hello to the good doctor for me,” the blond said as the window began to roll up.

  Just before it slid closed, he flashed a wide smile.

  The bald man stepped back as the car began to roll forward and he watched it reach the end of the lane, pause, then turn and disappear behind the thicket of parked vehicles.

  He didn’t much like this particular individual, but it wasn’t his place to make such judgments. As long as the Lieutenant was capable of carrying out his assigned task, that was enough. But he didn’t trust anyone who was pretentious enough to demand a title he clearly didn’t deserve. The man in fact had never been an officer, merely another of the borderline personalities who sometimes found their way into the vast ranks of the military and eventually discovered their egos weren’t compatible with the discipline and self-sacrifice required by such an organizational structure. In fact, the man had hardly managed promotion to Sergeant before being separated from the United States Marine Corp. But his service record did demonstrate a willingness to take on operations that were, at best, tactically questionable by normal U.S. military standards. Now that he was well embarked on his career as a mercenary, he had begun to develop a bit of a reputation within that shadowy world as reliable, if somewhat reckless. But that didn’t matter in this case. So long as he was able to retrieve the component and deliver it to the site, that would be enough. And that would happen within the next few days. The final piece would be done, the long months of grinding effort concluded.

  So it was done, the bald man thought. The last piece had been launched. Whoever composed the team assembled by this man, they would be on their way to visit Dr. Svag shortly. And having paid their respects, would collect the prize and head on to the site.

  Once there, the site security force would eliminate them, and that particular window would be closed.